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As a Firefox fan, I hope this isn't true. The dominance of Chrome isn't good for anyone. This will lead to (even more) websites not bothering to be made compatible with Firefox. We are headed back to the "designed for IE" days.

legend  ·  2184 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Former President George H.W. Bush Dies At 94

73 years of marriage! And I can't even keep a girlfriend for more than two months. Or get more than one girlfriend every 2 years.

legend  ·  2180 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: FCC chairman acknowledges Russia interfered in net neutrality public comments

Also some US corporations, and some sponsored politicians. Can those be acknowledged as well?

legend  ·  2180 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: December 5, 2018

Here's a free joke, you must be over 18 to read it:

A male whale and a female whale were swimming off the coast of Japan when they noticed a whaling ship. The male whale recognized it as the same ship that had harpooned his father many years earlier. He said to the female whale, "Lets both swim under the ship and blow out of our air holes at the same time and it should cause the ship to turn over and sink." They tried it and sure enough, the ship turned over and quickly sank.

Soon however, the whales realized the sailors had jumped overboard and were swimming to the safety of shore. The male was enraged that they were going to get away and told the female, "Let's swim after them and gobble them up before they reach the shore." At this point, he realized the female was becoming reluctant to follow him. "Look," she said, "I went along with the blow job, but I absolutely refuse to swallow the seamen."

legend  ·  2092 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Performance & benchmarks for the YugaByte database; imo this is the future.

For example here's a versus with the famous CockroachDB, and YugaByte comes out ahead: https://blog.yugabyte.com/yugabyte-db-vs-cockroachdb-performance-benchmarks-for-internet-scale-transactional-workloads/

And here's a technical deep dive into YugaByte and what it brings on the table: https://blog.yugabyte.com/technical-deep-dive-into-yugabyte-db-1-1/

I'm impressed. Open source, and getting lots of activity on GitHub: https://github.com/YugaByte/yugabyte-db

legend  ·  2092 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Killed By Google

It's fine, since most of those are created by them anyway. We'd have dysfunctional internet without Google at the moment, and a lot of the business infrastructure going down.

legend  ·  2092 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: CUYN marketplace - like Fiverr, but with cryptocurrency!

Great, because Fiverr is a joke, full of scams. For those that don't know what I'm talking about, here's a good article that explains it: Here’s why you will get scammed on Fiverr – the marketplace for scams, especially when it comes to marketing and advertising gigs.

legend  ·  2181 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Deepfake Videos are Getting Real, and that's a Problem

Even if the term ‘deep fake’ goes mainstream, there will be never be a way to create a fake video that can’t later be analyzed by experts and deemed to be fake or real. Media can make it sound like AI is there, yeah, maybe in 20 years. But for now, if a video is released and it’s been tampered with, there are traces of anomalies for even the best ‘fakes’.

Think about the ramifications as well, this isn’t a trivial claim, might as well claim you have magic beans to offer.

Does it mean no more video or audio can be made admissible in court when it becomes possible to create a truly authentic fake video or audio?

Do they think we are that stupid?

What they will rely on is the masses following the narrative set before them, for those who don’t seek to question, but that too is in jeopardy with the number of TV cutters, millennials flipping the middle finger to the American dream, and the continual false flags/terror/emotion hijacks revealing a less than authentic reality.

People are waking up across America.

legend  ·  2181 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Ethereum Energy Project Now Powers 700 Households in 10 Cities

Built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, the Lition market connects consumers directly with energy producers big and small but it only offers in Germany where it is licensed to operate.

I don't quite understand the need for a smart contract though:

> Once a user finds the energy they want to buy, they make a payment in euros to Lition. Behind the scenes, an ethereum smart contract detects this payment and automatically sends the customer their energy.

legend  ·  2181 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: IBM And The Blockchain Bet

So are we buying IBM stock, or no?

legend  ·  2181 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How I Stole Your Siacoin

TL;DR:

- Don't post your secret keys on a public social media network.

legend  ·  2181 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why Scarlett Johansson’s Picture Got My Postgres Database to Start Mining Monero

TL;DR:

- Exploit allows attacker to execute local shell commands on DB server, through queries

- Attacker wget's image file with embedded executable binary

- Attacker runs binary

- Antiviruses are less likely to see the cryptominer when it is embedded within the picture.

It seems like the real issue here is the capacity to execute these local shell commands through the database, not the fact that the image had an executable binary embedded within it.

legend  ·  2181 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies

Even if it’s not quite true it’s an interesting concept, hiding something into the motherboard fibreglass that can manipulate the stack...

legend  ·  2181 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Science Is Getting Less Bang For Its Buck

Funding has become outcome oriented and science has always worked to some degree by accident. I think what is being described in this article is a symptom of the calcification of institutions. It's a general rule that institutions established for the best of intentions inevitably become their own worst enemy because the institution becomes more important than whatever its founding goal was.

Schools, in particular, are great examples of this but so are government structures of all sorts, prisons, hospitals, banks. The institutions ultimately outlive and become contrary to their original purposes when the health of the institutions becomes the priority over time. When was the last time we had a teacher's strike over compulsory standardized testing rather than over wages? Sorry to say so but I think this is a damning fact.

Educational institutions have become progressively specialized over time with the specific intention of pushing scientific progress with this enormous blind spot for the serendipitous nature of discovery and invention. It's precisely the emphasis on STEM that is causing this failure. The harder you push the less progress you make.

It's not that mysterious why this should happen. When people come to believe that "science" is for specialists and not up to each of us no matter what our background is then there is a tendency to avoid becoming an active inventor because people come to believe they are unqualified to pursue novel ideas and that those well-paid specialists will inevitably do a better job than any individual can ever do. This is also why the GNU/Linux desktop never took off with the masses despite being quite usable and freely available. People feel that it's not their business and they are better served by waiting for some corporate solution to their problems.

This is, unfortunately, a very dangerous path which leads to tyranny and sadly that seems to be what we're sowing from our harvest of institutional specialization. If you look around at Humanities programs in universities today you will see a great decline in their influence, size and funding precisely because the students think the purpose of education is to get a job and that the only jobs that pay well are in technology.

This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that leads to a form of tyranny.

legend  ·  2181 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Microplastics found in 90 percent of table salt

Just a reminder that there's no study that proves microplastics are bad for humans. They are bad however for sea life.

legend  ·  2185 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Friday Fun Facts Four

This was great, thank you for your time. I wish I could subscribe to these, so that I get them in my email as well and I can forward them to friends. Maybe you should create a blog?

legend  ·  2185 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Europe's Hatred of Jews, And Ours

So, people are frustrated, don't have the strength to look themselves in the eye, wouldn't know what to do if they did, and so look for a socially acceptable and therefore safe scapegoat. It's sad, and extremely hard on civilization, that so few get a proper kindergarten training even in their senior years.

legend  ·  2185 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Timelapse of MS 10 rocket launch taken from the ISS

The meteor burning up in the atmosphere was pretty cool too!

legend  ·  2933 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 6 minute slap in the face from a fellow liberal, courtesy Totalbiscuit

Isn't TotalBiscuit the game caster? Why is this video "courtesy TotalBiscuit"?

Anyway, I subscribed to Jonathan Pie's channel, he has great content.